On the left-hand side, nearest to the wall, a soldier was holding back a couple of people whose filthy faces and bloodstained clothes showed they must be prisoners pressed into service as extras. On the far right were a couple of young men carrying buckets with coiled whips in them. Seated on a table were two or three more prisoners, spectators of the scene beneath them. A young woman was trying to hide behind them. The light was dark everywhere. On the right-hand side of the scene a prisoner, clad only in a loincloth, was being fastened on to a gridiron. Another man, naked to the waist, seemed to be supervising the fire underneath it. Powerscourt could see the flames taking hold below. He could hear the hiss as they leapt from coal to coal. Powerscourt thought it was probably the most obscene sight he had ever witnessed.
‘Do you not like my artistry, Lord Powerscourt? Do you not admire the echoes of the martyrdom of St Lawrence I showed you in the Hermitage? The prisoner in the loincloth, he even looks a bit like the dead saint. My two boys with the whips in the buckets – so much more appropriate than the fish in the original, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt? – are under orders to set to work if they think the man may talk.’ Derzhenov paused briefly and shouted something in Russian. The man supervising the fire bent to his task with greater vigour than before. The two guards fastening the man on to the gridiron strapped him down.
‘We think this fellow on the gridiron has links with the people who blew up Grand Duke Serge in Moscow,’ Derzhenov went on. ‘We’ve got a couple of the gang here. They’re a bit squeamish down there in the Kremlin. The unfortunate Grand Duke was shattered into hundreds of pieces by the bomb. Our friend here’ – Derzhenov pointed to the prostrate figure, his mouth gagged, his face already contorted into a rictus of pain – ‘is only being burnt a little. All he has to do is to tell us all he knows and he will be released.’
Derzhenov inspected his little tableau. ‘Oh, Lord Powerscourt, I almost forgot. You see the girl at the back there, hiding behind the men? That is his sister. We thought she might enjoy the show.’ Derzhenov laughed a bloodcurdling laugh. ‘If he does not talk, Lord Powerscourt, maybe we will swap them over. The young man can watch his sister take on the role of St Lawrence, that should loosen his tongue.’
Derzhenov steered Powerscourt back towards the corridor. ‘Would you like to join us in a bet, Lord Powerscourt? We take bets, you see, on the time the prisoner will talk or the time he will die. You can take your pick.’
Powerscourt shook his head and wondered how much more he could take. There was always a double-edged quality to Derzhenov’s displays of torture. One side of it showed how ruthless he and his colleagues could be. The other was a warning to Powerscourt. If you don’t cooperate, then you’ll be next on the skewer or underneath the whips or fastened to the gridiron.
‘We must take one very quick look at one of the cells near the end here,’ Derzhenov said, almost licking his lips in anticipation. ‘It is, dare I say it, another of my combinations of art and interrogation!’
Powerscourt had visions of rows and rows of real crucifixions mounted in the style of Rubens and Caravaggio and Tintoretto and the etiolated saviours of El Greco. What confronted him in Cell 24 of the Okhrana basement was worse.
On the back wall of the cell somebody had painted a forest scene in the evening. There were occasional shafts of light visible in the gloom. In front of this sylvan idyll a great tree trunk had been fixed with chains. And hanging upside down was a prisoner, his legs secured to the upper branches. His hands at the bottom of the tree were bound with rope. His arms were locked in a circle round his head. Standing by the prisoner’s left side was a young woman, almost naked, her bare right breast not far from the victim’s chin. In her right hand she carried a knife and she was peeling the skin from the prisoner’s chest in slow deliberate movements. Kneeling on the floor a male guard, also equipped with a deadly knife, was peeling the skin from his lower legs. The prisoner’s body was totally covered in blood.
‘The flaying of Marsyas, Powerscourt, do you not think it fine? And the girl at work on his chest, maybe arousing the final pangs of desire from the victim in her deshabille? My own special touch, I must confess. Really, I am not sure which I am fonder of, this Marsyas in here, or the Martyrdom of St Lawrence without. It is so hard to tell.’
The prisoner uttered what must have been a scream. The gags on his mouth made it sound like a small groan. ‘We thought this one was going to talk about half an hour ago,’ Derzhenov went on, ‘but when we took the gag out he just spat in the eyes of his captors. But come, upstairs, I have news for you.’
This time the Okhrana chief took him, not to his office, but to a small sparsely furnished sitting room on the third floor. The only decorations on the walls were a painting of a monastery and a silver crucifix. Any notion Powerscourt might have had about a religious side to the Russian secret service was swiftly dispelled.
‘Forgive me, Lord Powerscourt, they may be using my office for interrogations shortly so I thought we had better find alternative accommodation. We have a tame priest or two on the books here, you might be surprised to hear. Often some prisoners will talk more easily to them. This is the room we give the priests.’
So that explains the monastery and the cross, Powerscourt thought. He wondered briefly if it was the famous monastery Dostoevsky used as a model in The Brothers Karamazov.
Derzhenov was coughing significantly in the chair to his left. ‘I promised I had news for you, Lord Powerscourt. And what exciting news it is! Can you guess?’
Powerscourt wondered briefly if he was to be taken on a special tour of all the Okhrana torture rooms in Russia from Moscow to Archangel with specially adapted carriages on the Trans-Siberian Express, soundproofing for screams a speciality, and specially adapted facilities for carrying passengers half in half out of their compartments, being torn apart by the speed and the wind.
‘I cannot imagine, General Derzhenov,’ he said, his mind suddenly very alert. He remembered the rash message he had sent to the Embassy from the Foreign Office in London saying that he hoped to solve the mystery of Mr Martin within a week. He had thought at the time that he might catch something with that message. He felt sure Derzhenov had read the cable. Had his catch now arrived? Was he the catch?
‘I expect notice of this audience is awaiting you at the Embassy, Lord Powerscourt, indeed I’m certain of it. But it gives me great pleasure to be the first to tell you in person. Your request, Lord Powerscourt, your request for an interview with the Tsar has been granted! You are going to meet with the Autocrat of All the Russias! Tomorrow evening! To think that I will not be there to see it.’
‘This is excellent news, General Derzhenov. Thank you if your good offices have had anything to do with it.’
‘One must always do one’s humble best to help one’s friends, that’s what my dear mother used to say, Lord Powerscourt.’
Powerscourt tried to imagine what Derzhenov’s mother must have been like, monster, harpy, she-devil, tutor and mentor to the Borgias and to Lady Macbeth, ogress, fiend, but words failed him. He wondered if she were still alive. Better not to ask.